The infection which men caught from his work was a new kind of tolerance; not that cut-and-dry, rule-of-thumb tolerance which commands them to admit that others have a right to differ from them and to hold their own opinions; but a tolerance which is also an act of bonne volonté, springing from a kind of temporary metempsychosis, an imaginative transference of thought and emotion into another's point of view.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, November 11, 2019
Tolerance
Desmond MacCarthy (1877-1952), "Renan," Portraits (1931; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), pp. 219-225 (at 225):